In 2002, Higham met British archaeologist Roger Jacobi and the two worked closely together on the dating of several key Palaeolithic sites from the British Isles,[7][8] until Jacobi's death in 2009. The most notable result of this work was the redating of the Red Lady of Paviland,[9] an iconic early modern human from Britain. Later, Higham reported an age estimate for the Kents Cavern maxilla from Devon, England, the earliest modern human fossil in northwestern Europe.[10]

Since 2006, Higham and his team at Oxford have worked on defining the timing of Neanderthal replacement by anatomically modern humans in western Eurasia and quantifying the overlap between the two human groups. In 2014, results of this work reported in Nature placed Neanderthal extinction at around 41000–39000 years ago, and suggested a Neanderthal-modern human overlap of 3000–5000 years in Europe.[11] In 2013, funded by the European Research Council, Higham launched the "PalaeoChron" Project that focuses on the dating of late Neanderthals, early modern humans and Denisovans at hundreds of sites across northern Eurasia.[12][13]